[Marble-devel] Fwd: Re: [kde-edu]: Marble 0.5: The Road ahead

[Torsten Rahn]

Just making sure the marble-devel audience hears about it, too:

> Yes just on the subject on what you forgot about the Gps, we'll need a
> remodeled ui for the gps tracking thing too. Right now we have gps device
> geoLocation and also i've just implemented ip. address geoLocation and as
> of yet we don't have a way to choose between them.
>
> thats it from me
> Andrew Manson
>
> On 20/08/07, Torsten Rahn <torsten.rahn at credativ.de> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Now that we (finally!) got Marble 0.4 out of the door, I'd like to offer
> > my
> > thoughts on what features should be part of the Marble 0.5 release:
> >
> > In my opinion Marble 0.5 should emphasize the work of the Google Summer
> > of Code students. All features need to get finished for the public (So
> > the features need to look finished and well integrated into the user
> > interface,
> > work as expected and should be easy to use).
> >
> > So to get into details:
> >
> > * GPS/GPX support: Not too much left as far as I can tell.
> >
> > - Make "File View" only appear if a document has been opened and further
> > fix
> > the UI.
> > - Do further tests for GPX file format compliance
> >
> > Andrew: Anything I forgot?
> >
> > * KML Support:
> >
> > From what I have seen the following essential features on Murad's
> > kml-tasks
> > list haven't been implemented yet (correct me if I'm wrong):
> >
> > 1. Show list view on the left that indicates opened kml/gpx files. List
> > view
> > should only appear if there are more than one opened file:
> >
> > This is partially done already:
> > - The "File View" has already been integrated by Andrew for GPX. We need
> > to
> > add KML support to it now as well.
> >
> > 2. Initial support of KML style objects (icon style, label style)
> >
> > The latter is rather unfortunate but I think we can live without it for
> > the
> > 0.5 release.
> >
> > There are two more show stoppers for 0.5 which are not on the kml-tasks
> > list:
> >
> > 3. Translation of KML files which is pretty much needed for KDE 4. The
> > idea to
> > solve this problem was to use Wikipedia's data as an online download and
> > get
> > their individual language data of the cities for translation. So a user
> > who
> > is from spain would have a database of cities downloaded in the
> > background which is compiled from the city data from
> > http://es.wikipedia.org/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/. That means:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/ has the largest amount of cities among all
> > languages (about 160.000) The data base compiled for spanish would
> > contain those city names from en.wikipedia.org with the ones that also
> > exist in http://es.wikipedia.org/ replacing the entries from
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/ to make sure that they get properly translated.
> > This is just the rough idea.
> > I'll take care of compiling the data needed (with input from Tim Alder
> > from
> > Wikipedia).
> >
> > 4. Country support: For initial very basic country support it would be
> > nice if
> > we'd just add countries as "invisible" placemarks (i.e. placemarks with
> > no symbols). Problems:
> > - Where do we take the country data from (needs to have a Debian
> > compliant license)? This isn't too hard to solve though.
> > - The label for the country names needs to be specially aligned and
> > layouted
> > to make it look like a country name. So in opposite to real placemarks
> > there
> > will be only a single place tested (instead of 4), the label will have a
> > larger font, will be center justified and will probably be displayed
> > semi-transparent.
> > We need to adjust PlaceMarkPainter to either process the countries as a
> > different "layer" that gets rendered before the city data (seperate
> > KMLDocument). Or we need to change it to display city data and country
> > data
> > from a single KMLDocument (I'd rather prefer the further).
> >
> > Later on (for 0.6) this feature will get extended to make countries to
> > get "area support" (so the application is aware of each area/shape
> > covered by
> > each single country.
> >
> > Murad: is there anything I forgot?
> >
> > * Flat Map:
> >
> > There are three visible bugs in the implementation right now. I'm pretty
> > sure
> > all of them can be fixed within the next week. Except for that further
> > cleaning up and performance optimizations are needed.
> >
> > Furthermore there are two features that would be nice to have for the 0.5
> > release:
> >
> > 1. Mercator projection (like Google Maps does)
> >
> > 2. Make texturemapper only update newly shown regions and reuse the parts
> > on
> > the screen that got rendered already before. This didn't work for
> > spherical
> > projection for obvious reasons so right now Marble still renders and
> > updates
> > the whole screen for each frame. However this trick would work nicely for
> > the
> > flat projection and would make moving around in Marble much smoother and
> > faster than for the flat projection (in fact as fast as scrolling in
> > khtml and kpdf).
> >
> > The latter would be something that we can live without (however I'd
> > really like to see it in 0.5).
> >
> > Carlos: Is there anything I forgot?
> >
> > Also we need to solve the remaining "Known issues" of the 0.4 release no
> > latter than for 0.5 (Especially: fix the embarrassing Wikipedia browser).
> >
> > None of the features we need for Marble 0.5 require further translation
> > string
> > changes as far as I can tell (and if there should be a few left then
> > please
> > add them before the string freeze on August 26).
> > We also need to make sure that work on all the features left still gets
> > started before August 26, so we are still in accordance with the feature
> > freeze. Except for the country feature I think all of the other essential
> > features have been worked on to some degree. So that's the only issue
> > left of
> > concern.
> >
> > Apart from beginning work on country support there is another feature
> > high on
> > the wish list: OpenStreetMap support: However I think we should declare
> > this
> > feature "optional" for Marble 0.5. It really should need only little work
> > on
> > Marble's source code to get this implemented (most work being to setup
> > the server with the right settings for the tile render software). However
> > 0.5is meant to focus on the work of the students and I'd like to see
> > 0.5released within the next 4 weeks.
> >
> > So that's my thoughts on Marble 0.5. Are there any things I've been
> > missing?
> >
> > --
> > Torsten Rahn
> >
> > Tel.: 0 21 61 - 46 43 - 192
> >
> > credativ GmbH, HRB Mönchengladbach 12080
> > Hohenzollernstr. 133, 41061 Mönchengladbach
> > Geschäftsführung: Dr. Michael Meskes, Jörg Folz
> > _______________________________________________
> > kde-edu mailing list
> > kde-edu at mail.kde.org
> > https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-edu
>
> --
>  Torsten Rahn
>
>  Tel.: 0 21 61 - 46 43 - 192
>
> credativ GmbH, HRB Mönchengladbach 12080
> Hohenzollernstr. 133, 41061 Mönchengladbach
> Geschäftsführung: Dr. Michael Meskes, Jörg Folz